Chocoladefabriken Lindt & Sprüngli AG (0QKN) Q4 2025 Earnings Call

Investor webinar replay

Replay transcript excerpt

Hello everybody here in Kirchberg and hello more than 100 participants online. Welcome to the full year result presentation of Linden Sprüngli 2025. I will walk you quickly through the highlights of 2025 and we'll have a deeper look at the original performance, then I hand over to our CFO Martin Hug. He will give us an explanation on the financial results and explain the progress that we made in sustainability. And then I will outline our growth agenda and the outlook for this year and for the years to come. And then we will open the floor for questions and answers. We grew 12.4% last year. the strongest organic sales growth with the exception of the recovery after COVID. We achieved 5.9 billion Swiss francs turnover. We improved our EBIT slightly by 20 basis points to 16.4% or 971 million Swiss francs. Our earnings per share increased by 8.5%. Our free cash flow was in line with our expectations slightly lower than our long-term guidance at 7.5% due to the higher value of the inventories. We operated in a challenging environment. It's not a surprise for any one of you. The cocoa price volatility forced us for the last four years to increase our prices overall in the area of more than 40%. Geopolitical tensions had an impact on consumer sentiment. Global trade wars and tariffs also gave us a tough time. do the calculations and we saw a clear consumer behavior change. Consumers had to tighten the belt and consumer sentiment, as mentioned, was weak across the globe. We continue to ramp up our global expansion. As you know, we generate 87% of our sales in Europe and in North America, and we bring out the seeds to cover the white spots on the map, so we opened branches in Bulgaria, signed a joint venture in Saudi Arabia, Open subsidiaries in UAE, in India, created a logi...